Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather

by Karen Lamb

  6

  Jack

  Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.

  ‘Arcades’ by John Milton, 16451

  People who are lonely and wish for love but doubt its existence often despair of finding it. This was true in Astley’s case, but she was about to have her doubts cast aside. Her escapes to Brisbane were convivial as well as necessary – and one of them turned out to be more than surprising. Sometime in 1947 Astley set off to see a chamber music concert in Brisbane. She had been looking forward to it, not least because such events provided a rare chance to be among folk talking her kind of talk. She was now twenty-two and in some ways more confident than before: she was in her second year as a qualified teacher and had survived both isolation and the rigours of her profession.

  That evening she noticed a man approaching (definitely a ‘man’), strongly built but not tall at five feet nine inches and evidently older than she. He spoke to her about the music in an engaged way Astley had not previously encountered: his passion and knowledge were surely rare. Whenever people asked Astley about her husband in years to come she would always recall this moment, as pure romance, the way they had met – talked at interval – and had coffee afterwards: apart from her brother Phil, she said, ‘He was the only person I’d ever met who knew anything about music!’ Music would forever be their bond. But now this man was interested in this woman. Jack Gregson had been formally discharged from the army in January 1946, recording his marital status on that certificate as ‘Married’. This official record would not necessarily have reflected a marital estrangement had it existed. What did he see in the twenty-two-year-old Thea Astley at a chamber music concert in Brisbane?

  He might not have seen a potential wife: he was married, ten years older than Astley and had seen considerably more of life. Jack had married before the war, in 1937, and had been living in Sydney at beachside Clovelly with his wife, Marion Eileen (known as Eileen). They had one daughter. He had enlisted in the army in February 1942 and at the age of twenty-seven had been ‘demobbed’ at the rank of private. Much of Jack’s war had been spent in Higgins Field, a large airstrip near the tip of Cape York in far north Queensland, but he had not been posted overseas. Like Thea, he knew a great deal about small-town ennui.

  Ten years into their marriage Thea and Jack remembered their early days fondly. In 1958, when Hal Porter published his first novel, A Handful of Pennies, drawing partly on his army experiences, Astley wrote her first fan letter, lauding his rendition of ‘life in the army mess’ and ‘all that shallow … brainless authority’.2 She and Jack bonded in their enjoyment of the farce of officialdom. Astley later said that she was naturally ‘agin the government’ being half Irish.3

  As a Protestant and a married one at that, Jack Gregson was out of bounds to any Catholic, a difficulty that loomed large for Astley. However, neither she nor Jack intended to let this get in the way of their developing relationship. Jack was with this attractive, lithe, assured, apparently independent, educated, clearly single (but not outwardly sexually confident) young woman. Astley was intoxicated by this man who knew more about music than she did and who had evidently lived more. Jack had a sly wit to match hers; he was calm if on the cynical side, and apparently a man of few words. An unsuccessful first marriage might have sobered him, as probably had the Depression, giving gravitas to his presence.

  His family background was different from Astley’s too. When Jack was small his mother had been hospitalised for serious post-natal depression, which at that time could mean a lifetime away from the family home as sufferers were often institutionalised. Jack had grown up largely under the care of his father, helping bring up his three younger brothers. Clearly his had not been an easy life, with difficulties that were not easy to speak of in those days. Was Astley already sensing Jack’s strength and stoicism? If one day there was leaning to be done, might he be the rock?

  After so much isolation and life endlessly deferred to the occasional forays to Brisbane, Astley was thrilling to the possibility of romance with velocity and surprisingly little fear. She fell passionately in love with Jack, knowing full well the vocal disapproval that would be heaped upon such a marriage in the eyes of the Catholic Church. What mattered now was the freedom to pursue a sexual relationship, and in a small town that meant marriage.

  Jack’s divorce appears to have been a very efficient one for the times. A year or so after their concert meeting Astley reorganised her teaching commitments so she could attend a registry office ceremony in nearby Gympie. Without fuss or ceremony Edmund (John) Gregson married Thea Astley on 27 August 1948, just two days after her twenty-third birthday and with none of her family present. It was not an elopement, but it must have felt like it. It would be eight years, and after the birth of her son, before Astley resumed regular contact with her parents.

  The newlyweds headed straight for the honeymoon hotel they had booked. On the wedding night, as Thea later joked to her women friends, the mystic and the spiritual aspects of marriage were absent. In the morning she and Jack discovered large bloodstains on the counterpane. Mortified, they tried to wash them out. The attempt was hopeless; they started to laugh. They quickly bundled up the counterpane and took it to the nearest rubbish tip, a gaily hysterical pair of co-conspirators.4

  In many respects the marriage really was the beginning of new freedoms for Astley. Not the least of these was her freedom to express herself sexually. Twenty years later in very different circumstances she shared memories of these special early days of physical abandon with Tom Keneally, a fellow writer and former seminarian who she knew understood her Catholic background. ‘When we first met we used to make love like crazy … total abandon,’ she said. Keneally understood the ‘emotional dwarfism’ the Church tended to inflict on its followers, had seen the kind of euphoria Astley expressed in other Catholics; he had seen how repression, once lifted, led to an almost compulsive temptation to sample pleasures in abundance. As he said to Astley, the trick was ‘not in leaving the Church, but in making the Church leave you’. But even in the 1960s, twenty years later, Astley was a long way from quite managing that and she seemed to Keneally ‘Godstruck and Hellstruck’.5

  In her relationship with Jack, however, Astley was free and exuberant. Marriage had put her outside parental control. With Jack she could say anything, however unconventional: that bond was strong from the start, made stronger because they knew that theirs was an unconventional marriage. Their partnership was illuminated by jazz, which Jack was rapidly introducing to his new wife. Together they thrilled to the sounds of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan. Johnny Hodges’s ‘Star-Crossed Lovers’ became a favourite.

  The energy and freedom of new love, sex and jazz became inseparable in Astley’s mind for the rest of her life. This new sense of aliveness would have the most profound effect on her writing, introducing a physical tension, a need for perpetual inventiveness, a certain largesse. The lushness was music’s equivalent of Queensland’s ‘overblown quality’.6 Classical music had played its part in her early striving for technique in poetry; now this new kind of music attuned her to words and mannerisms in a quite different way. This affinity with jazz was opening up a new form of auditory imagination for her, the very kind that might lead to a fiction of the ‘flesh and blood’ she so wanted to create. It was a way of being able to hear the full range of sounds in the world, then being able to reproduce them in a fresh composition.

  In her fiction Astley used musical references to model characters or to shift them psychologically. A character’s mind might be full of classical music – to show an evolved intellect – but jazz was better to bring out a character’s exuberance and refusal to follow convention (for example, the drum-playing Bonnie in Reaching Tin River). Likewise, she compares the appreciation of genuine ‘improvised music’ with ‘musical pretension’ (especially in her favourite novel, The Acolyte, about a musical genius and his followers).
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br />   Characters who use musical knowledge as a form of snobbery, ‘merely as a dividing line between themselves and the hicks’ – as do the Talbots in A Descant for Gossips – do not fare well in Astley’s fiction. This seems a kind of projection on Astley’s part, since she herself had a tendency to slip the odd musically obscure reference into a conversation. Those on the receiving end were supposed to assume passion and pure motive on her part, but this could also seem curious, if not spiteful, behaviour. A former colleague recalls such conversations:

  Astley: ‘You do know jazz musicians are serious musicians?’

  Colleague: ‘Yes, I do.’

  Astley: ‘“Knoxville 1915” op. 24 – cantata for voice and orchestra by Samuel Barber – ever heard of it?’

  Colleague: ‘Well, yes, in fact I have.’

  The colleague added, ‘She assumed I would never have heard of it and that she was the only one in Sydney who knew of this glorious work. She was very disappointed when I knew.’7

  Jazz provided another opportunity for Astley to be ‘agin’: classical music lovers widely considered it a threat to the aesthetics of musical composition and an inferior form of music generally. The fact that she and Jack thought the opposite was another co-conspiratorial act against convention: two serious music lovers bonded in a defiant gesture. It was the kind of gesture upon which the marriage more or less permanently settled. Thirty years later, in the 1970s, when Astley gave a speech on behalf of the Sydney Conservatorium’s Big Band (then being wound up) she reminded the audience of how jazz came into its own, quoting Henry Pleasant’s Serious Music and All That Jazz, explaining that jazz was the only satisfactory exit from the technical cul-de-sac recognised by composers everywhere.8 Her defence of jazz thus lasted well beyond its rapid rise as a popular form; in her mind it remained entwined with her own emancipation.

  Thea and Jack spent their early time together at Jack’s place in Rome Street, Yeronga, a southern suburb of Brisbane leading down to the river. It was here that they spent their last few months of living in Brisbane. Jack’s support of his former family seems not to have been discussed openly ever, but Thea’s own independent nature meant she was happy to see things being shared, especially the finances. Jack was marrying a professional teacher: they would be a team. Both were disgusted by the Department of Education’s view that once married and pregnant, a woman should give up her teaching position. Thea deferred to Jack in many things, but she also liked the fact that this was not always necessary.

  The hunt for jobs, money, houses became urgent and Jack began applying for clerical and accountancy positions in Sydney. Jack’s father and brothers were there, and he would be nearer to his daughter, though there is no record of any formal arrangements for visitation being made. A move away from Astley’s parents would have seemed wise, at least for the time being. Jack soon accepted an accounts job, firstly at Elder Smith and then the Mitchell Library in the city while Thea applied for a teaching transfer. It would be their next adventure.

  The suburbs that became the sprawl of Sydney were barely starting to form and there were few rentable properties that would allow Jack to get to the city on public transport. Difficult as it was in the late 1940s to find affordable accommodation, they found one floor of a large Victorian mansion at Ellesmere Avenue, Hunters Hill. Perched magnificently high on a hillside overlooking one of the many Sydney waterways leading into the harbour, it gave them more space than either had ever dreamed of.

  They were now Mr and Mrs Gregson, one couple among others. When Jack’s friends, usually army mates, passed through town Thea held the floor, providing a new kind of theatre in which Jack was to be forever cast as a background character. He had become used to her outspokenness and was happy to be less vocal in company than she was. When Thea took the floor he enjoyed watching.

  At the time, and into the 1950s, Astley’s outspokenness attracted silent disapproval and discreetly raised eyebrows. Jack remained a loyal support, while Thea became ever more expansive. She must have felt lucky that she had such an equal partnership herself, but was troubled by the unequal nature of marriage itself. She began to watch other couples like a hawk.

  The lot of the married woman was tied up with Astley’s own sense of loss, which included, to her surprise, the loss of Queensland. Having spent the last few years there looking and feeling every bit the town outsider, here she was an outsider again, in Sydney. Nothing had changed the long-standing interstate rivalries and snobberies that bound her to parochial defensiveness. She found plenty to resent in the so-called sophisticated capital of New South Wales: Astley’s new teaching job with the New South Wales Department of Education began on a pay scale that officially erased her previous years of teaching in Queensland, and she was being paid less than her male counterparts too. The metropolis could be, she realised, its own kind of prison.

  As always in such times, she turned to poetry. If she could write about routine and banality from Pomona in Queensland, she could write about banality from Hunters Hill in Sydney: ‘“Clerk; eight fifty; family; office”. Feeling homesick, her feet craved “familiar floors”.’9

  Money was an extremely pressing matter for the couple. Neither had brought capital to the marriage and their savings had been eaten up in the interstate move. They really were watching pennies and they never forgot arriving in Sydney with less than two shillings to their name. Their financial struggles became part of the mythology of Jack and Thea, in stories endlessly retold: ‘Almost like the time that …’, ‘Not as bad as when …’, ‘Try arriving with …’

  Perhaps for this reason one of the earliest decisions in the marriage was that Thea and Jack would maintain separate bank accounts and would carefully tot up and divide everyday expenses. It helped that Jack was an accountant but Thea was no fool with maths and figures either. Money changed hands according to what each agreed was owed the other – receipts held as proof – a habit that would stick throughout their lives together. In years to come this division of money would perplex their son and it was certainly unconventional for the times. But Jack and Thea both knew that even with two incomes they would need to be careful with money if they were ever to think of owning their own home. There was little to do but work.

  Jack began his city-to-suburb commute while Astley calculated for amusement, as was her habit: ‘3,482 train trips as of …’ Astley started full-time teaching. As the years passed, family and friends would wonder at Jack and Thea’s perverse respect for each other’s ability to ‘slog it out’.10 As they did not own a car, they had some serious daily travel in a city whose public transport systems were yet to be fully established.

  Astley went first to the secondary Drummoyne Boys’ School, not far from the Hunters Hill flat. After that she was moved to outer west Homebush, an Intermediate Girls’ High School that was still also part of the primary system (taking girls up to the early years of high school while Strathfield Girls’ High was being completed). Astley’s experience of teaching was about to change dramatically but it was in these busy suburban schools during the 1950s that her natural gifts as a teacher found genuine expression. Toughness of all kinds had been required in the small Queensland schools, but now she was dealing with city adolescents, not primary school children as she had in her first teaching positions. Teenagers had other sometimes challenging ways of behaving and the grown-up-sounding married title of Mrs Gregson might not offer much protection.

  At Homebush Astley was teaching large groups of girls in what could be a rough outer suburb. Any camaraderie between staff members was based on survival, and in this school the most difficult class was ‘2K’, known as the ‘hound dogs’. This academically and behaviourally challenged group of thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds met Astley for English. Colleagues were often amused by Astley’s off-the-cuff commentaries on dullness and dullards, and they couldn’t wait to see what Mrs High and Mighty would make of the infamous 2K.

  But 2K matte
red just as much to Astley as the bright girls did, for reasons her colleagues couldn’t guess. She did not see them as a job-lot of human nuisance; Astley saw young, vulnerable girls who already believed they were somehow ‘not worth the effort’. The scholarship girl from All Hallows’ who had been humbled by good fortune still had egalitarian instincts. To Astley the girls in 2K were like the Fortitude Valley girls who used to wait on her table.

  The young teacher walked quietly into the rowdy group, who largely ignored her. She just stood there, she did not raise her voice. This was a simple, human act that made Astley different from other staff members and it had the effect of uniting the group in silent curiosity. She immediately capitalised on her advantage and moved slowly but athletically into a cross-legged yoga pose on top of her desk. She then began speaking quietly and respectfully, waving her arms expressively, as if she naturally assumed they would be interested.11 The ‘hound dogs’, by now, were in a state of rapt attention.

  Staff members took turns to look in on the famously raucous 2K, now quiet, and its new English teacher: the taming of 2K became staff-room legend. As one colleague put it, Astley had been so successful with the students because she related to them, they to her, and the girls felt that at last someone was being ‘real’ with them.12 Astley had chanced herself on being herself and they loved her for it. Even Mrs Gregson’s chalk throwing – her aim was deadly – they could accept as serious because it was done without rancour. Astley’s carrying voice helped, trained for an audience from her Barjai days.